Ron Howard isn’t hanging around, as only a day after it was revealed that Universal was passing on his ambitious plans for an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, he’s found something to fill the time while he tries to set the three-movie and two TV series project up elsewhere. He’s already planning to make Rush, about the rivaly between F1 drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, this autumn, and now he’s set to direct Under The Banner of Heaven for Warner Bros. as well, accoridng to Variety.
Not content with having annoyed Opus Dei with The Da Vinci Code, Howard looks set to raise the ire of Mormons with this new film. Dustin Lance Black (Milk) will adapt the 2003 non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer (who also wrote the book that the 2007 drama Into the Wild was based on) about two fundamentalist Mormon brothers who murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother, claiming they were acting on orders from God, who’d supposed sent them a ‘removal revelation’. Incidentally, Dustin Lance Black comes from a Mormon family himself, so does have the background for this.
It appears Warner is also mulling over taking on The Dark Tower as well, but that’s far from certain at the moment.